Category Archives: retro computer

A trend of the 80’s were mobile video games. As in the Gameboy, PSP and in the meantime also smartphone times, it was quite practical to have a small, compact game console with you as a young person.

As an example, I dug up one of these “mini consoles”. It is a popular video game called “Trick o Tronic” with a small LCD screen. The difference to today’s LCD displays is that the game image does not consist of individually controlled pixels, which in total show the game figures, but each figure represented in the image was a kind of controllable symbol, so to speak. So, for example, a male had to run from left to right, so every movement and position was present as a separate symbol.

The background of the field was simply an image (photo or drawing) behind the LCD that represented the scene. The whole game was powered as well as the former digital clocks, with a 1.5 volt button cell. The sound of the game came from a piezo loudspeaker that could play beeps. (but only with one frequency)

Before it lands in the archive, I have to put it here too …
It is a hard drive from the 90s (exactly 21.10.1991) – namely a 2.5 inch disk from Seagate with the incredible storage capacity of 85.3 MB (yes MEGABYTE). In comparison, a 160 GB (Gigabyte) disk from Fujitsu in 2007.

The Seagate disc with the designation ST-9096 was installed in a Commodore Amiga 1200. It kept the complete Amiga OS 3.1 including plenty of applications space. At that time you could not get that 85MB so easy.

To the technical data: If you want to format it today, you should know the following parameters: 980 cyl, 10 heads, 17 sectors gives a capacity of 85,299,200 bytes. The HDD has a power consumption of 2W in read / write mode and 1W in idlemode. 300mW still consumes it in sleep mode.
Interesting is perhaps even the size comparison to current records.

The interface complies with the IDE standard (Integrated Drive Electronics).